Some Distant Day
by icecreamlova
Summary: Dom has always been a visitor. Until today, he has enjoyed it. Dom/Kel. Ish.


_Written __for _(and winner of!) the Tamora Pierce Experiments: Writing Challenges March Challenge. Go check out the excellent fic already entered.  
**Edited 17/03/2011** for silly mistake.  
**Edited 07/01/2012** for minor typos

* * *

**Some Distant Day  
**_By icecreamlova_

- : -

_Do you think you'll ever stop?_

_Do you think you'll ever settle down?_

- : -

Dom first joins the King's Own for other people: the tired eyes of houseless children, the desperation of the parents struggling to rebuild destroyed walls... and the Own would sweep in and help.

Why he stays though, that is for himself. The day his sergeant asks, "Didn't you notice your last break was two years ago?" is the day Dom realizes he will never leave the Own behind.

The King's Own's lifestyle entails a certain degree of sacrifice. Experience swiftly squashes any dreams of heroics (though not quickly enough to prevent his cousins teasing, "How many villages did you save single-handedly today?"). Whereas the rest of his family gathers for Midwinter festivities, most of Dom's holidays feature sleeping in dirt and standing guard in the wild. He has collected more than his share of injuries, and knows they are only a taste of what's yet to come.

The other drawback, of being so much on the move, he doesn't mind as much. Dom has always been a visitor. He's traveled around Tortall and served the people, and he's laughed off his dangers when speaking to his parents. ("Are you incapable of taking anything seriously?") His rare visits home generate such shock that he is gone before anyone recovers sufficiently to ask questions: his life is rootless.

Until today, he has enjoyed it.

Today she is wearing green silk that flatters wide shoulders and tough muscles of calf and thigh, accentuating them as she lifts her polished bow. Today her sleeves are wide and frivolous and tied with amber ribbons, like a monarch butterfly for each arm, fluttering as she draws the arrow smoothly past her temple, until the bowstring crackles with tension. Today her silly, precious ornaments, gifts from New Hope's children, jump as the arrow flies across the field, embedding itself with a thud on a distant oak. Today marks the fourteenth day he has seen her in the last three years.

"Nice shot," Dom calls, now that he won't be interrupting. "We missed you at the mess hall. One of my nice, green recruits said something about your temper right before New Hope's kids mobbed him." He raises an eyebrow.

She turns, lowering her weapon. Behind him, New Hope sprawls and bustles in spite of the dim autumn light, separated from Kel's impromptu archery arena by a loose line of balding trees. Those dreamy hazel eyes follow his long-limbed movements as he stops momentarily, to wrench one of her arrows from a beech's trunk.

Kel exhales softly, rubbing her forehead with her free arm. "I was here. It's the first time I've visited New Hope in three years - "

"As far as the villagers know," Dom can't resist adding, offering Kel her griffin-fletched arrow, "or they'd guess why the barkeep couldn't keep his nocturnal antics to himself."

She plucks it from his fingers, blush belied by a frowning, wordless rebuke: _'Will you be serious?'_

"It's the first time I've seen you in nearly as long," Kel adds off-handedly, "and I hardly have time to get used to the changes to either before leaving again. I'm going to be dismayed this morning, so I won't be when I'm chasing raiders at the Scanran border." With typical professionalism, she settles into doing it.

Dom watches. In her mid-twenties, Kel has preserved distinct qualities he recalls as vividly as if they were young only yesterday. He's noticed that ever since her years as a squire, still blushing from her now-faded crush, Kel has had a talent for appearing remarkably still: not like a cat before pouncing, but something often mistaken as harmless, like the surface of a pond. Her head's position does not change; her expression is a pleasant portrait; her tough muscles hold her posture with nary a quiver. Even as her eyes dart and slide, she could be a statue. It is a remarkably soothing sight.

It is a rare one, too. Her moments vanish (of course they do) whenever Kel realizes she is being observed - except when she is fighting, or shooting, and discomfort flees. Dom's not going to test whether overstepping boundaries would make that disappear too.

"Spill it out," Kel murmurs, aiming again.

Dom shrugs. "You caught me. I just came to say goodbye."

Kel's arrow is a streak of brown, so fast it must be broken, must shatter against tough oak, yet all that the impact fells are two leaves: orange and yellow and borne by faint autumn breeze.

"I was just about to return to town and see all of you off," Kel tells him, slinging her bow and meeting his eyes steadily. (He had never thought otherwise.) Her lips quirk slightly as she grins ruefully at the arrow she will probably never wrench out. Her eyes flick: she is following the two leaves as they flutter through the line of trees towards New Hope and over the heads of Dom's King's Own group (when did they get so close?).

"I'll see you some day in spring," Dom offers.

Kel nods.

He hesitates, and so does she, but the silence deafens, and the towns of Tortall are beckoning. That is who they are.

So in the end, he stows that unfinished thought for some distant day, when he'll find the both words to say and the chance to stay to say them. Overhead, the orange and yellow leaves drift, still dancing around one another after all this time.

Dom is, and always will be, a visitor.

Until today, he has enjoyed it.

- : -

_"Do you think you'll ever stop?" he asks._

_"Do you think you'll ever settle down?" she retorts._

_They are friends. They are travelers. They part with the agreement to catch up some future autumn in New Hope, when circumstances allow it._

_Grins fade as two paths diverge. One horse gallops east, while the other's legs eat up road to the west, until seconds later, all that remain are two sets of tracks pressed deep into freshly fallen snow._

- : -

**Well?**


End file.
